Korean gadget manufacturer LG is set to become the first company to mass-produce high quality flexible screens intended for a new wave of curved and bendable smartphones and other gadgets.
It’s been a long time coming, with the company previously showing off numerous prototypes and other ideas at tech shows over the past year or two, but today LG announced that it will soon start to make flexible 6-inch OLED displays on a big scale.
The screen itself will offer a picture quality much like we see in smartphones today and being an OLED type screen it will offer vivid colours but won’t be a big drain on battery life and remains very thin. LG says that by using special plastic substrates it can create a smartphone screen that has flexible properties, allowing its designers to create weird and wacky curved devices.
Recent rumours have suggested that the company will introduce its first ever curved smartphone next year, a device called the LG G Flex. The phone will likely run Android and will be the first from the company to feature the 6-inch curved display.
Whilst the screens can be bent and twisted, their main purpose will be to allow LG – and perhaps other manufacturers – to create phones with gentle curves to better suit the human face. After all, nobody really feels comfortable holding a rectangle with harsh edges against the side of their face for long.
Other manufacturers have also shown a keen interest in flexible displays in recent years, including LG’s main rivals Samsung and also Nokia. LG’s Korean rivals Samsung are thought to have their own flexible phone in the works, so we could end up seeing not one but two bowed smartphones in the very near future.
With curved TVs also set to become the next trend, could 2014 be the year for bendy gadgets? Let us know what you think.